


roll here in my ashes

by ciredan



Category: Far Cry 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Wizards, Dark Magic, M/M, Necromancer and Necromancee to Lovers, Necromancy, OFC is a side character, Prince Ajay Ghale, Rating May Change, Slow Burn, Tags May Change, Title from a Hozier Song, Trans Ajay Ghale, necromancer sabal, rated for language, wizard sabal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:06:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22258429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ciredan/pseuds/ciredan
Summary: Ajay Ghale dies, and all hell breaks loose. The king is at once furious and inconsolable, driven beyond all logic or reasoning by his grief. Perhaps it is that mix of unknowable emotion that causes him to enlist the help of the wizard Sabal.
Relationships: Ajay Ghale/Sabal
Comments: 17
Kudos: 12





	1. the waking

There's blood crusted under his fingernails. His ribs ache, as if they've been torn asunder over and over and had the smoke wrenched from his lungs and new life breathed into his bellows before being patched up thrice over. All he has is a name-- "Ajay Ghale"-- so he concludes that it must be him. Ajay Ghale coughs, waking up among the dirt and worms for the first time in an eternity. Fuck, there's blood everywhere.

"You are awake," came a voice from somewhere in the darkness. He's disoriented and he can't make it out, but it doesn't sound like anyone he knows. Does he know anyone? Ajay can't remember. He's drawn to the voice like an insect to honey. The syllables curl up around his diaphragm like a snake and he finds himself keening towards the sound. He coughs and he retches, and when he brings his hand away from his mouth there's black blood staining his palm and the taste of bile filling his mouth.

He needs a goddamn drink.

"You don't sound surprised," Ajay rasps. He hauls himself up to look around but the room is almost completely dark aside from a cove in the corner where a man leans against a desk. He is silhouetted against the faint blue-green glow of a tome on the desk, and Ajay cant really make out any features.

"I have no doubts about my ability"

"Ability?" The man holds out a hand and a burst of flame rips outward from his palm, curling up, up around his arm before dissipating in the stagnant basement air. For a brief moment, this _wizard's_ face is illuminated and Ajay catches sight of a strong jaw and scarred lip and piercing green eyes and immediately he wishes the flare would last longer. "oh. my name is Aj--"

"Ajay Ghale, I'm aware." The figure smiled to itself, turning away from the table to face Ajay as he stalks towards him. Ajay thinks distinctly that the man is rather cat-like, holding the grace and poise of a leopard in his graceful movements but the raw strength of a tiger curled up in his broad frame. It's vaguely threatening. "My name is Sabal. Your father, Pagan Min, enlisted my help to bring you back to life."

The words ring in his ears like a gramophone stuck on repeat. He's pretty sure Sabal keeps talking but he finds himself barely able to pay attention. The shock dazes him at first, then fills him with an icy dread that permeates his chest and threatens to take over every part of his newly reformed mind. He knows that its the start of a panic attack, the liminal space where nothing quite feels real and he can feel himself looking at his body through the static of a TV screen, and slowly his hands become unfamiliar, and he can barely feel his chest even as his breaths come faster and faster, barely breathing out and just pulling air through and through like a watermill gone postal. Sabal reaches Ajay and pulls him up, up off the floor with his neck tucked under Ajay's arm. Even though Sabal is smaller, he still manages to hold Ajay's weight with ease. Decomposition is a hell of a diet, apparently.

Sabal reassures him in a gentle voice that this is not, in fact, some cruel joke of the afterlife, and it isn't until then that Ajay realises that he's been speaking all this time. It's been tumbling out of his mouth without him even thinking about it ( _"I was dead? I was dead. I am dead, I'm dead. Shit, fuck, this can't be happening. I'm still dead aren't I?"_ ). His head begins to ache; a slow, throbbing pain; and quite suddenly sleep takes over him.

And Ajay is once again consigned to the void.

***

Ajay wakes up in a room that he can only assume was his own, and a man he vaguely remembers to be his father is sitting by his bedside with his head in his hands. Everything seems horribly, awfully familiar, yet Ajay only feels guilty that he can barely remember anything despite all the trouble they must've went to to bring him back here. The bed is plush and richly coloured to match the rest of the room; four posters and high ceilings with ornate patterns and gold trims around every single item. Idly, he thinks it a little ostentatious. Presently though, the man-- _"Pagan Min"?_ has noticed that he's awake and has flung himself onto Ajay in the meanwhile.

"Ajay, dear boy, my son, my boy," he babbles, and the grip he has around Ajay's shoulders would be crushing were he not racked by sobs every couple of words. "Jesus, fuck, don't scare me like that."

"I- I'm sorry," he chokes out around the chokehold, because that's all he can think to say. "I didn't mean to."

Pagan looks up at him in disbelief, worry contorting his aged features. He looks like he hasn't slept in years. His eyes are red-- rubbed raw and with heavy bags, his hair is overgrown and shaggy, his posture is diminished, defeated, and he pulls Ajay up from lying down to embrace him properly with his arms thrown fully around his body. Pagan holds Ajay close like he's savouring each heartbeat and the intensity feels like a cage or, much nicer, a weighted blanket. "You have nothing to apologise for, dear boy," Pagan remarks once his breathing has evened out some. "You just scared me. I'm glad to have you back, is all."

And all of a sudden, Ajay feels just like a boy again. He's twenty-six going on two days old but the memory of years past comes back to him now, when he broke his leg after falling out of a tree and couldn't get back home. He was far out, too far for anyone to hear him and not yet old enough to have his own mobile phone to call for help. He remembers crying and crying out for help, for his mum, for anyone, and he thinks he's doing the same now. He's twenty-six years old and crying into his dad's crumpled old shirt cause he thought he'd die back then but he did die just now but he's back. He's back and it thinks it should've been bigger; death feels anticlimactic now.

"I didn't see her," he sobs, "I didn't see her. I might've seen her-- mum-- fuck, I don't know. I can't remember, I don't remember any of it." Ajay's grasping at the only family he has left, desperately trying to cling to Pagan and keep him here, close to him. He feels the fabric tear. "I miss her."

Pagan nods and shushes him but Ajay can feel the tears soaking through his dusty cut-up shirt too. "I miss her too," he whimpers.

The minutes pass in relative silence. They might've turned to hours but neither of them knows to care. Exhausted by their emotions, they fall asleep in the golden light of the evening, holding each other tightly because they just can't bear to let go. 

This time, the void shows Ajay the warmth of old spices, of a gentle touch and biting words and a beautifully woven saree.

This time, Ajay dreams of his mother.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've had this as an idea/plot bunny in my head for the longest fuckin time, and finally getting this down feel the goddamn best. ill try my hardest to continue writing now that ive actually started it, so please feel free to harass me whenever to make sure i dont forget again. i also know pretty much where the story is going/what the overarching plot is, so dont worry about that :3 thank you for reading though, all three people that still give a toss about far cry 4! i write these mostly for myself.


	2. the rising

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ones idea of "normalcy" becomes somewhat tainted when you've just been raised from the dead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: scars & implication of stabbings
> 
> please lmk if you know anything else that you would like to be tagged, or anything you are worried might come up in the future so i can keep that in mind wrt future cws

Pagan is gone by the time Ajay wakes up in the morning. He's aching all over with the weight of old wounds left to fester that are only recently closed. Ajay pulls off his shirt and tosses it away, looking down at his torso for the first time, well, in his life, apparently. His skin is blotchy, covered in dirt and the remnants of old blood. There's no patchwork of sewn-together limbs and chunks of flesh (which is kind of what he'd been expecting) but his stomach and entire right side is discoloured and blooming blue-green and purple, and there's a stitched up scar curving jaggedly up over his navel and tapering off to join the two incisions under his chest, which had been there already, like a knife had ripped violently through his body. It didn't look like an accident.

It was cold, way too cold for the amount of sun that was positively pouring into the spacious room from a window that spanned nearly half of an entire wall, and he realised with a shiver that he hadn't eaten at all since he was... reanimated. Ajay hesitated to call it that but he supposed that there was only so long he could go on pretending like he hadn't literally died. Does this make him a zombie? Brains had always freaked him out and he hadn't had any cravings for flesh just yet though, so he considered it a good sign.

He rose, pulled on a clean shirt and trousers and entered the wider palace to try and find something to eat. The immediate corridor lay before him like a highway and-- with a left turn and a right turn and another left turn, and a _"Did I see that plant earlier?"_ , and a _"That door looks pretty familiar"_ \-- he soon found himself completely lost in the sprawling lanbyrinth. Apparently you can't rely on muscle memory to take you around your childhood home if your muscles have partially decayed and your memory mostly lost.

Just as he was considering finding someone to ask for directions to the kitchen, he heard a familiar voice echoing from somewhere nearby. 

Pagan, his dad. He sounded pretty mad but Ajay could just wait outside or something. Pagan is his dad. Following the sound _("--on't fucking care, Gary--")_ , he arrived outside a dark wooden door that was left slightly ajar, from which he could just about tell the sound was coming from _("--fucking do what it takes then; we can't just fucking have these bastards fucking everything up")_. Pagan was his dad. The king. He should definitely commit that to memory. 

There was a beep, a sigh, and the clatter of something plastic hitting a desk. Ajay tentatively waited for about thirty seconds, decided that it would be worse for someone to find him standing outside like a creep, and rapped twice on the door. 

"What is it?", came the reply, flatly. 

Ajay pushed open the door just wide enough to peek inside. "It's me," he announced. "I, uh, gotta eat something and I can't find where I'd do that." 

"Oh," Pagan looked up at that, a small smile breaking out on his face. "I'd have sworn I'd told the kitchen to send you some food up, but no matter! Let's go fetch you something, yes?" 

Pagan rose from the desk and positively swept across the floor in one grand motion. He enveloped Ajay in the kind of hug that took a few seconds to react to. The warmth emanating from his body seeped directly into Ajay's bones and he leaned in gratefully to the touch. This was right. It felt normal, familiar. 

After a few long moments, Pagan pulled back and lead Ajay out of the room with an arm stil slung around his shoulders. Pagan navigated the palace with a practised expertise and it wasn't five minutes before they arrived at the kitchens. They were modern and sleek, a far cry from the rest of the intimately decorated interior, but still edged with the same tones of red and amber. 

The food comes hot and quick and Ajay finds he can't eat very much before he feels like throwing up. Pagan sits next to him, watching, barely touching his own food, probably still in disbelief that Ajay is alive and sitting here again. Ajay knows that he's just as surprised himself. Everything feels spectacularly normal; the ambient buzz of the refrigerator melts away his thoughts into an easy wave that sloshes over any insecurities and comforts him with the knowledge that he is by no means meticulous enough to construct so much detail just to trick himself. Yalung might, however, powerful as he is, be able and wanting to hand him this momentary peace just to wrench it away and laugh at the trust he gives so willingly. 

"That necromancer wants to see you today," Pagan interjects. The thought quickly dissipates into nothing more than a passing worry. "Something, something, follow-up. Make sure you're not disintegrating or anything." 

Ajay cocks his head. "Is that standard?" 

"Fuck knows. You're back though, so I'll assume he knows what he's talking about." 

The table setting is suddenly very interesting to Ajay. He doesn't know Sabal that well and while he is, of course, indescribably grateful for his services, he is at the same time still wary of magic and its users. Ishwari, while she had had a natural gift in the art, had still suffered greatly from the toll it took on her body. He guesses it would be best to try and eat some more so he doesn't pass out during the day and looks to cut up some more of his bun. 

A pause. "Where are the knives?" 

Pagan, confused, reaches across the table to grasp at empty space on the table by Ajay's plate. He handles the air confidently and points to it with his other hand. 

Ajay waits for Pagan to drop the act, to laugh and rise to get an actual knife or to point out where they are kept. He waits-- waits for any sign at all-- and when Pagan starts to look impatient and the joke should have been dropped half a minute ago he wordlessly reaches out his hand to take the air from Pagan. 

His father handles the lack of knife far more precisely than someone miming should be able to. Ajay watches his fingers curiously as he flips it around in his hand, the raise of his palm as what he guesses would be the blade-end swings round to point at Pagan and the delicate control of his wrist as he balances it against the heavier weight of the handle end. Ajay fumbles for where that handle should be, and to his surprise feels a weight and an entity in his hand as Pagan lets go. 

Ajay slowly lowers his hand and places the 'knife' carefully down on the table. "You know, I'm actually not that hungry," he says carefully. A low, thrumming dread settles in the pit of his stomach the way it always does when he can't trust his senses. 

Pagan twists up his face but relaxes quickly. "Alright then. You probably ought to head the necromancer's way sooner than later." 

Ajay nods and rises to leave. Halfway out the door, Pagan pipes up again. "Oh, and Ajay?" 

He turns back to face Pagan. 

"Be careful, son." 

Ajay smiles. "I'll do my best." 


	3. the grounding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> check end notes for TWs (includes spoilers)

A guard arrives to meet Ajay just outside the kitchens, in the hall. She has long braided hair, skin darker than his, and two sharp eyes already analysing him from under her heavy brow. She tells him her name is Heena and that she will be escorting him to the necromancer's lair. Heena starts off down the winding corridors and gestures at Ajay to follow as they talk.

"The bridge connecting the two halves of the city was recently destroyed by terrorists in a bombing so, much as we would prefer a convoy, that simply isn't a possibility at the moment." She stops outside a small wooden door, tucked into the corner of a bend in the hallway just next to the kitchens. Opening the door reveals a cramped closet filled with disused and spare outerclothes. She pulls out a long old coat, hat and shawl and bundles them into Ajay's arms. "You will wear these. They ought to help hide your identity."

"This seems like a lot," he pants, staggering under the force of the clothes. Ajay adjusts his grip and looks over the mass at Heena. "Is it really necessary?"

She stares at him for a long moment as if trying to decide whether he is joking or just stupid. "We are in the middle of a civil war and someone, demonstrably, wants you dead. Forgive Pagan if he would rather we err on the side of caution."

Quiet, he stares down at the clothes. He can feel his face heating up from embarrassment. Right, of course. How he'd forgotten he doesn't really know, but he can tell that her swift rebukement is going to have him doubting his logic for a good few days yet. "Of course, yeah. Sorry."

Rifling through the deeper pits of the space, Heena pulls out a jacket of her own and a long skirt that she pulls up and tucks into the waistband of her standard-issue combat trousers, carefully concealing the holstered firearm at her hip. Ajay follows her lead and shrugs on the coat. It's slightly too warm for the inside of the palace but he _can_ remember at least that the deceptive brightness of the outside doesn't mean much in the middle of the Himalayas. He wraps the shawl around his shoulders and pulls the hat down over his ears, tipping the rim down over his eyes.

"There," Heena starts, looking him up and down with slight amusement, "Never'd guess that you're a prince."

The journey out of the palace is swift but confusing. Despite his best efforts, any and all landmarks blur into one swirl of spatial dissonance. Ajay figures he'll get to grips with it eventually.

He doesn't think it's technically paranoia when someone is actually out to get you, but whatever it is it fucking sucks. The sneaking keeps him on edge. Several times he sees Heena's hand flex toward her gun, though the journey is uneventful enough. Sabal's _lair_ , as Heena had put it, was located within an alley deep in the bowels of the city. They passed through several markets to reach it, taking a wide detour around the bridge through the narrow dirt streets and under tall and precarious buildings through whose canopy Ajay could barely see the sky. The difference between the palace and the city was stark-- constant noise polluted the air, an atmosphere of pure survival pervaded every facet of the population and only grew more dire the further away they travelled into downtown.

The alley in question was located just off from one market; dark and dingy and secluded away such that the bustle of the citizens' everyday life was muffled by the time they were halfway down the lane. Stopping outside their destination, Heena paused for a moment to check against an image on her phone. She then tugged Ajay to the side, positioning him against the wall and out of immediate view of the door. She rapped confidently on the old, darkend wood and stepped back, unholstering her pistol with precise expertise.

_She really has everything covered,_ Ajay wondered in careful amazement. _Kyra, this is thorough._

A few tense moments passed with no answer. Then, all of a sudden the alley was awash with teal light pouring from a dingy window. Ajay caught sight of a shadowy figure, barely visible behind the glare. It was disappeared before he could properly parse it from the smudges and grime that left it blurry and discoloured, and replaced with a too-large eye peering out into the street, cloaked in darkness and darting around, but an unmistakable, striking green that tore into the shade and made its presence unmissable.

Then the door swung open with a croak and Heena was pointing the pistol into the darkness, calling out with a confident "Who's there?" as the she peered inside. Ajay thinks she must have somehow missed the eye-- or the projection of the eye, or whatever it was. 

A summons slithers out through the inky darkness, beckoning them to enter. It sounded to Ajay's ears quite like the necromancer's voice but was hard to recall through the fragments of memory. The descent was quiet. Heena kept Ajay behind her. The stairs stretching out immediately from the entrance were rickety, causing Ajay to stumble more than once. He hugged close to the wall as they twisted and turned, never having felt more out of his depth.

They enter into a room stacked to the ceiling with tomes and scrolls and material components for spells, illuminated both directly by candles and ambiently from various experiments and bioluminescent fungi. At the centrepiece of the space rose a pair of shrines dedicated to Kyra and Banashur, towering things that encompassed nearly the entire far wall, making themselves impossible to ignore. Offerings of incense and animal parts were devoutly arranged at the bases-- religious iconography seemed to take up more space than the tomes; icons of Kyra and Banashur occupied every free space.

At the base of the twin shrines, appearing as though in a shallow pool, kneels the necromancer himself in a high-collared robe. Emerald green wisps flit around his head and dissipate along with the water as he cuts himself off at the apex of his breath and moves to stand.

Sabal wears a practised smile as he meets Ajay's eyes, then Heena's in turn from behind a pair of slender-rimmed rectangular glasses. "It is always a relief to see that my work has not immediately, ah, crumbled back into ash," the words slink out through the half-darkness and reach them with a purr.

"That happens often?" Heena bites.

Sabal shakes his head and leans over to light some incense at the plinth. The smoke curls up and around and invades every inch of the space, turning the room fuzzy and warm as it fills the air with saccharin. "There is always a risk associated with resurrection. The human body is complex and even with proper training much can go wrong. The good King did not, however, hire me without confidence; you are in better hands with me than most."

Heena continues to glare and places a hand on Ajay's shoulder. "Necromancy. Resurrection is a divine act. What you are doing here is necromancy."

Sabal's hackles raise and between heartbeats that easy charisma is dispelled and a wraith of a man stands before them. Ajay glances at Heena, whose disposition has not changed, then back to Sabal, who is gathering storm clouds and cracks of lightning like whips around his fury. Great bellows draw air in, and in, sparking the air alight with each and every breath as the temperature in the room drops. Green waves roll out from his eyes and break against the floor, which shakes and trembles in tempo with the rise and fall of his chest, threatening to explode.

"All magic is a gift from Kyra, so technically everything I do could constitute a divine act" speaks a perfectly calm and normal Sabal, "And necromancy is but a fraction of what I do here. You know, you try to tell people you're a wizard who just so happens to be able to raise the dead and all of a sudden you're being chased out of town at the end of a pitchfork. 'Resurrection' is just better for business."

Sabal shakes his perfectly sunny and temperate head and Ajay spies a glimmer of iron tethering a second face above Sabal's true form.

Heena sighs. "There are not many who still earnestly believe that. Sure, call it whatever you want: it doesn't affect my job, which is what I'm only trying to do here. You'll forgive my suspicion, given that the Prince," she ruffles Ajay, who jerkily snaps up to look at her as she speaks and catches the weary slump of her spine, the tension held in her clenched brow, and watches how it melts away as she takes a breath, "has already died once this month at the hands of terrorists."

"Of course. We can agree to stop preventing each other from performing their duties then." Sabal grins and steps forward to take Ajay from Heena's grasp to lead him toward a doorway, partially obscured behind a hanging thangka. "Come. We can perform the check-up through here."

The emergent space is notably more barren than the previous. The floor is earthen as though carved directly from the ground and, as Sabal flicks a spark towards an iron-cast lantern suspended six feet up in the centre of the room, Ajay sees wooden beams like the spokes of a wheel sprawling outward from that centre, holding up the ceiling against the bare earth above them. Roots creep into the room at the junction of the wall and the ceiling and curl tenderly around a desk, shoved against the far wall. There's blood crusted under his fingernails and his ribs ache is if they've been torn asunder over and over and had the smoke wrenched from his lungs and new life breathed into his bellows before being patched up thrice over, and since all he has is a name-- "Ajay Ghale"-- he realises with a start that this was the original point of resurrection; the site of his Genesis. And Ajay looks up at the first person he ever saw and remembers the lightning crackling under Sabal's fingertips, setting every nerve on fire as he pumped new fire through Ajay's dead veins.

Sabal catches Ajay's eyes and offers a grim smile. "Death is not so neat and pretty as we would like, is it?"

Ajay shakes his head. "You do this a lot?"

"Not as often as I'd like. It is rare that people are trusting of spellcasters nowadays, so the occasions where I am allowed to help become fewer and fewer." He sighs and gestures to a couple of chairs set out adjacent to the desk.

They each sit down and Sabal takes a moment to look over some notes before turning his attention back to Ajay. "Yes: abdominal stab wound. Let's take a look." He grabs a fountain pen and gestures upward, then begins to write on a fresh page.

Ajay gracelessly drops the shawl in the dirt next to him, then shrugs off the coat as well. He hesitates as his fingers reach the back of his neckline, allows himself to feel the fabric for a moment before pulling it up and over his head too. The open air was morgue-like in its frigidity and it still felt weird to be shirtless in the presence of other people. Sabal glances up from his writing and surveys Ajay coolly, eyes scanning up and down his bare torso as he turns the chair to face Ajay fully. A firm hand tilts Ajay's head upward and exposes the column of his neck for Sabal to inspect.

A few minutes pass with Sabal making passing comments as he busies himself around Ajay like "Any latent necrotic tissue that would make itself problematic would be visible on the surface by now, it seems that your body has been able to fight it off without intervention" and "It is good to see that the bruising appears minimal and is healing quickly". Ajay is entirely aware of Sabal's touch in all instances, his presence trailing around him when he instructs Ajay to breathe and raise his arms and flex his hands, his careful gaze when he evokes a magelight and observes the dilation of Ajay's pupils, the gentle warmth of his palm as it rests atop his heart and feels its (no doubt exhilarating) pace. He stops to record everything intermittently as he works, writing down his notes in a script that blooms across the page.

Sabal's attention winds its way down to Ajay's stomach eventually. The wizard settles in a squat in front of Ajay, considering the scars in a purely intellectual way that has Ajay's gut twisting and heat rising to his cheeks as he looks down at the way he tucks a strand his silky black hair behind an ear and the wide green eyes just past those spectacles and the round, rugged masculinity of his face and _now is not the time to develop a fucking crush on your primary care physician, holy shit._ Sabal cradles his hands in front of his face and breathes a few short words of incantation into them. A charming little purple thing reveals itself and dances around the space between his palms as Sabal presses it carefully into the area around Ajay's mortal wound, sweeping up and down the length of the scar in steady motions. Ajay grits his teeth but finds that he releases a breath he wasn't aware he was holding, slumping against the back of the chair as residual aches and pains are banished.

As he approaches the tail end of the scar towards his chest, Sabal pauses. "These are unrelated?" he questions.

"Huh?" Ajay looks down to where Sabal was indicating. "Yeah. They're from top surgery."

Sabal nods and returns to passing the orb up and down the scar. "I have a cousin who had the same procedure."

"Oh, dope."

Sabal finishes up and sits down heavily in the seat across from Ajay. He pushes back another lock of hair that had come loose from his ponytail and adjusts the position of the frames on his face. Turning to look at Ajay, Sabal meets his keen gaze with a wry smile. "Now," he begins, "How are you holding up, psychologically speaking?"

Ajay shuffles in his seat and leans to grab his shirt from the pile. "Good," he answers curtly. "I've been good."

"I'm glad to hear, but that's rather strange," Sabal replies, half looking at the desk where he is writing down something else. "Dying is usually very traumatic. Are you sure you're OK?"

"I mean, I'm good right now. I've been a little nervous, I guess, but I've always been jumpy like that." Ajay half shrugs as he pulls the shirt back on, smoothing down the sleeves and stretching a little. Sabal shakes his head slightly and pulls his eyes back to the paper. "Do necromancers have to abide by doctor-patient confidentiality?"

There's the briefest flash of that hurricane from earlier and Sabal grimaces as he talks. "I'm a wizard," he protests, then transitions near-seamlessly to his previous easy magnetism as he holds up the paper he's writing on, fanning it out between deft fingers to reveal two separate sheets, "And don't worry: I can be incredibly discreet. Have you experienced anything anomalous, anything that maybe differs from other people's experience of the same events?"

Drawing his shoulders up and into himself, Ajay sighs through clenched teeth. "I haven't really been awake that much but, uh, this morning I couldn't, like, see this one knife but Pagan could, and I could feel it and everything. But I couldn't see it."

"The brain is very good at ignoring things that trouble it, moreso when there is magic involved." Leaning against the desk, Sabal taps his own head with the end of the pen and pulls one leg from under his heavy robes to fold over the other. "It was a stab wound that did it-- a knife, yes? It is likely you effected some abjurative charm to protect yourself from seeing a possible trigger without realising."

Ajay shakes his head. "I'm no spellcaster. Never been able to."

Sabal straightens and places down his pen carefully. "If you will excuse the quick history lesson," he starts with a tired grin, "If you recall, earlier I mentioned that magic was a blessing to us from Kyra; it was given to all humans alongside our souls as the energy that animates and binds us to mortality. Spellcasters harness their emotions in order to access their magic-- absolute mastery over emotion is the supreme goal for monks, after all. But this also means that anything that can alter our emotional state can also alter our magical ability, including trauma. It can be evocational and volatile, causing you to surge and lash out, and it can also be abjurative: seeking to shield you from harm at the expense of ordinary functioning. In any case, aiming to control your magic may be beneficial to your mental health, and vice versa."

Ajay nods, following Sabal's hands as he gesticulates during his explanation. "Thanks."

Sabal quickly scrawls down some last notes on one of the pages before standing up and handing it to Ajay, who rises with him. "This contains physical information that a mundane doctor might need to know, along with advice for proper recovery. As for the psychological information," he flicks his fingers and the second page is consumed from the edges-in by smooth black flames in an instant. Sabal grins, touching Ajay lightly on the arm. "That is safe with me. Though I do recommend talking to someone."

"I'll think about it, doc." Ajay reaches down to tug the coat back on and bundles up the shawl in his arms as he moves to leave the room. "And, uh, thanks for all you've done."

"Your father's money is thanks enough." Sabal waves him off with a titter and sits back down at the desk, heaves the large tome that had been pushed to the side for the appointment towards him and begins to study it.

Ajay pushes his way past the thangka back into the first room and finds Heena milling around and taking in all the paraphernalia. Without the initial anxiety of arriving for An Event, he finds himself able to admit that yeah: its a lot. The lingering incense is a little overwhelming and leaves a sickly feeling in the back of his head, like its trying to claw its way inside his skull. But Ajay scrunches up his nose and with a steadying breath he finds that he can block it out rather quickly.

He approaches Heena. "Hey, I think we're done here."

She starts, looking up at him as though snapped from a dream. "Oh, yeah. Sure thing." Heena's hand moves stutteringly to rest on her holster again. Her brows furrow as she takes point to lead the way up and out the winding staircase and breaches the alleyway that, despite its seclusion, was stark relative to the subterranean abode.

The day had moved on since their entrance and the bustle of noon had at some point melted into the sleepy business of near-evening trade and groups of people loitering around with no real rush to be anywhere. Ajay watched people cross past the narrow window of the opening in shades of blue and brown and green with hints of gold flashing momentarily from under jackets and blouses as he wrapped the shawl back around his shoulders, sinking into the fabric against the chill. Heena stares with him, eyes wide and agitated.

"I should've gone in there with you," she says, rubbing at her eyes with a sigh. "That's what I was here to do. He didn't try anything did he?"

"No," Ajay confirms. "He was quite helpful. Don't worry about it. Probably just a wizard trick."

"That's what I'm worried about," she hisses. "Why on earth should he want to get you alone? Kyra, he's even got you saying wizard."

"Privacy?" He shrugs, taking a step towards the market. Heena scoffs and the conversation trails off.

They draw little attention as they cross through the plaza, able to take a roughly direct path towards the main street from whence they came, but Ajay could swear he feels eyes in the back of his head the whole way there. Worry builds up like a ticking clock along the back of his neck, raising all of the hairs on end. Its just as Heena tugs on his sleeve to get him to hurry up that he hears a distant exclamation of _"Shit!"_ and--

He lurches forward at the last moment on pure instinct. The thundering, unmistakeable _BOOM_ of a bomb detonating in a explosion of grit and kerosene. Clouds of dust fill his vision, blinding him. The force rips him away from Heena and sends him hurtling into a wall.

The market erupts into flame.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fair warning this is not going to be a healthy relationship purely due to the fact that sabal is the most homophobic gay man i know. mostly a joke, there will be no homophobia except for the fact that this is not a rajay fic.
> 
> TWs:  
> bombing (mention of previous AND a bomb goes off at the end)  
> more discussion of stabbing (brief and not gory)


End file.
